The High Carley Initiative
Introduction
High Carley is a derelict 11-acre site in the South Lake District near Ulverston. The High Carley Initiative is to convert this former TB isolation hospital into a showcase of environmentally sustainable development. It will have energy-efficient housing built with natural materials, co-housing with shared facilities, a tele-cottage workspace, a visitor centre promoting ecological development and housing, a natural health-care centre, and a centre teaching environmental leadership – as well as how to build eco-villages.
This site has been a white elephant for some years, and there is growing local support to do something imaginative. The site was dedicated to restoring health, and the gardens used to be beautiful; it would a fitting memorial to create here a new environment to nurture the land and nourish the spirit. High Carley will promote local economic growth and environmental tourism. Interestingly, it's near the main Lakeland road to BNFL Sellafield Nuclear Visitor Centre. Look Mum! -- Let’s visit High Carley!
What is / Who are the High Carley Initiative?
The High Carley Initiative grew from a suggestion at a training programme for Lancashire Centres of Environmental Excellence. The core team are Ian Roberts, Director of ENVIRON – a leading environmental consultancy; Graham Pinfield a principal adviser with Lancashire County Council’s environment directorate; Architects John Dryden and Rod Hughes, Cumbria County Councillor Edward Acland, Trainer Sibylle Rhovier, David Saunders, a business consultant and environmentalist, and communication consultant Marcus Brierley.
Gareth Nash and Keith Cowling from Lancashire Co-Operative Development Association helped sow seeds for the project and are taking a friendly interest. Planners at the South Lakeland District Council have also been supportive. We already have funding interest from Triodos Bank, and the Ecology Building Society. Our team has links with other eco-village groups, especially the Atalanta Institute in Brazil. We are already attracting potential residents, natural builders, helpers, and friends with eco-village and natural building experience. The High Carley initiative will evolve into an Eco-village community run by its residents, workers and stakeholders.
Ownership of the site has been in dispute, but this is moving towards resolution. Joint owners, the Skipton and the Furness Building Societies have recently renewed their planning permission for a high-density housing estate with 87 homes. We hope to create a win-win proposal which will result in a go-ahead for this alternative option of a low-density environmentally friendly sustainable development.
Fulfilling the Rio Earth Summit and Habitat Agendas
Governments want to encourage sustainable development -- developments that leave a lighter footprint on the land, consuming fewer non-renewable resources, while developing our human resources, creating work and contributing to a better society. The High Carley Initiative will take all these objectives into account in an innovative, synergistic synthesis of environmental, social and economic agendas, creating a model of a win-Win-WIN for all.
An Environmental Community
ENVIRON’s ‘Eco-House’ in Leicester attracts thousands of visitors a year, all interested in environmentally sound housing. Demand for such housing is growing -- building costs are comparable with conventional housing, but running costs are far lower. The houses also last longer and they are healthier and more fun to live in. How to fulfil the pent-up demand? -- replicate using High Carley as a model. High Carley will be a showcase of beautiful, eco-housing built with locally sourced natural materials. It will also be much more than this…
An Economically Strong Community
A community owned business will run the working space and visitors centre, ensuring that all development is in tune with the existing residents -- who will also benefit from the visitor and training centres. We will actively recruit a synergistic mix of skills to create a self-sufficient and self-supporting business community. Because High Carley will be a model and inspiration for other eco-village developments, we are likely to attract enthusiasts and experts who want to promote environmental community life. This means the work and play at High Carley will be have a focus on teaching, consulting, design and the promotion of sustainable living.
An Ideal Working Environment
High Carley will not be yuppie eco-dormitory housing. We want to model economically effective living that minimises the use of non-renewable resources, especially transport. By creating a working environment on-site, residents will be able to do their regular work where they live. It’s expected that most of the businesses will have an environmental or other supportive focus, and will work together generatively and synergistically. The co-housing concept will be extended to provide shared resources -- the telecottage model. All homes and businesses will be networked together and directly connected to the Internet.
An Environmental Visitor Centre and Community Centre
The visitor and teaching centre will include exhibitions and teaching areas demonstrating environmental technology and showing how this site represents best practice in environmental living. Computer displays will run an explorable 3D Virtual Reality animation of the whole site showing all the environmental features in each house -- while allowing real people to actually live in their homes without being disturbed. A visitor’s hall will be ideal for concerts, dance, parties, theatre etc., enriching local cultural life. A natural health care centre will attract visitors, and create more jobs. Other centres, like Findhorn in Scotland and the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales already uplift and inform their visitors. People will leave High Carley thinking: "This is great, I could live here." And then perhaps: "We could build something like this where I already live."
Above All -- A Community
Most current housing developments are developer-led financial propositions. A site is acquired, and houses built and sold at maximum profit on a first-come, first-served basis. Little thought is given the social or economic needs of buyers or the ongoing costs of living in and working from such housing. The focus of High Carley means prospective community members will self-select, sharing a common purpose and many overlapping common interests. The theme of a model sustainable development community will create a millennium Village, not a random collection of individuals living near each other. We will encourage multi-generation family living, and build a harmonious social structure. Above all, High Carley will be a place for people to live, eat, think, work, play and grow together.
Low-Density Mixed Land Usage
High Carley is one of very few sites in the UK in open country with planning permission for housing. The site has been a white elephant for some time, precisely because it is not really suited to a modern high-density housing development. Being rather remote and badly serviced it is well suited to a more self-sufficient environmental development. High Carley gives us the unique opportunity to do a small-scale pilot of low-density mixed land use -- natural houses in their own allotments.
Here is a very fresh look at the smallholding principle -- minaturised to 'micro-holdings' perhaps, but still with the potential to be self sufficient for food and more. Commercial development of dormitory housing here would be unimaginative, and an unsustainable drain on resources and transport, situated as it is well away from potential places of work. This plan is very different, to imaginatively create a site which is a genuine community, and economically generative.
Co-Housing and Shared Facilities
The co-housing concept provides a bigger ‘bang-for-the buck’ by creating shared resources, and spreading the cost of what might otherwise be considered luxuries over the whole community. This will mean that some of the housing can be modest and low cost, while providing a rich set of features for shared use by the whole community. These can include play areas, workshops, recreation (tennis, swimming etc.), laundry and so on. In an environmental setting this readily expands to include components such as waste treatment, energy generation, composting and transport. An Internet infrastructure will connect the site with itself and the world at low cost.
Who Will Live at High Carley?
It could be you! In our out-of-balance society, we yearn for natural living spaces and a return to community. Ample space, shared resources from co-housing, and a supportive work environment all fulfil deeply felt needs, and will help create a positive, uplifting place to grow. Themed environments are often oversubscribed -- that’s excellent, because we want this to be the seed and model for more environment and people-friendly villages. There will be a mix of large homes, low cost starter housing, and shared facilities to accommodate single people, older people, visitors and guests on study programmes. Initially, we plan that residents will be those who can contribute most to create, grow and propagate High Carley.
Co-Operative Development
High Carley is in tune with the ideals of the Co-Op movement, and with many other organisations with strong ethical principles. We want to work with such organisations to develop and promote new models of right living. High Carley will aim to promote all that is good, and to reduce all that is not good. High Carley will be non-political and non-religious while promoting a strong political and social agenda to bring out the best in us and live up to our responsibilities to take care of Mother Earth.
A Showcase For Developers
Besides building our own housing, we’d like some of the housing to be build by nationally known developers, as showcases of the best they can do for environmental development, and to involving them in developing better homes for the future. This will be a testing ground for them to experiment with new ideas, network with other developers and natural builders, and seed their future developments as the centre is visited by environmentally concerned future home buyers...
An Ongoing Natural Building Resource
The homes will be of the highest quality, built exclusively with natural materials, sourced as much as possibly locally. Rather than build the whole site at once, we plan to build the housing steadily over time, creating an organic feel. Building work will always be going on, and we will develop a team of builders, craftsmen and apprentices with natural building skills, and teach courses on self-build and use of natural materials. We will be a resource for environmental building initiatives that will be inspired and promoted by High Carley.
A Research and Teaching Centre for Cumbria University?
High Carley will be a centre of excellence in environmental living, sustainable design, natural building, natural health care and personal development. It will research and develop best practice in sustainable living. The visitors centre will help and inspire casual visitors as well as those wanting to learn more in depth over time. Short and long courses will be offered, as we as internships and apprenticeships. As a teaching centre we will work closely with others to provide and promote regional schools and higher educational initiatives. The High Carley Initiative aspires to become a valued and useful part of the proposed Cumbria University’s environmental faculty. The teaching centre will also be used to train and develop the High Carley Community.
Life in Tune with Natural Law
From what we know of ‘sick building syndrome’ and Feng Shui (the Chinese system of energy balancing for buildings), it is obvious that buildings and communities can equally damage or promote health. We will seek to design the overall community as well as individual buildings in accord with Natural Law, so that health of residents is promoted. Harmonious planning will help with business success, help maximise the educational value and most fully inspire our visitors. High Carley will promote a feeling of harmony with Spirit and the elements. We want the architecture to support and inspire.
Natural Building
We will use best practice from the eco-building movement, suited to our area. Natural materials with low embodied energy, that yield energy efficient structures. Our favourite is a high-tech timber frame construction using a structural foam of straw for infill, made by mixing straw with a wet slurry of clay and a little lime mortar, poured and tamped into forms , as if pouring cement walls – wattle and daub revisited! The result is superinsulated – filled cavities without the bricks and breeze block – and covered with plaster or stucco, the results are beautiful. This use of wood and straw reduces atmospheric CO2 and counters global warming. Timber frames are very beautiful, as well as strong and flexible, and infinitely more earthquake-proof than brick building!
Creating A Spiritual Site
High Carley will research, use and teach the best forms we can find to create spiritual sites. A newly revived technology is the ancient Indian architectural and town planning system of Stapathya-Veda. It’s already being used with great success at showcase sites in North Carolina and Iowa, USA. Owners love the feel of their natural homes and comment on how the orderliness of their workplaces leads to clear and creative thinking. High Carley could also serve as a Stapathya-Ved show site in the UK, adding to its success.
Funding The Initiative
This initiative will be inspiring to government at all level, and could well be publicly funded. But this also is a project that will be very attractive to people who will want to live there, and which could equally well be funded by financing of the housing. So while we need seed funding to get things moving, High Carley should be self-funding and self-sustaining. Future developments will increasingly follow this model. For this reason we believe it desirable that this initiative be funded privately rather than publicly, so it can be easily replicated. We believe private sources will find this development very attractive.
A Chaord - A Set of Design Principles for Right Living
We are using the opportunity that the High Carley site creates to develop and refine a set of principles for natural living that can be applied anywhere. These principles will be like a seed, first planted in the South Lake District, then hopefully in many other places. The plan will be to ‘infect’ other home-building projects with the High Carley virus. We’ll talk with Dee Hock, founder of VISA, and the ‘Chaord’ concept (about organic chaotically ordered systems) on how best to rapidly redevelop the housing industry using our model.
What is a Fair Share in Our Land?